Going forward, every contract given to Major League Baseball players and athletes in general will either have a “pandemic clause” or the entire collective bargaining agreement will address the issue. Currently, however, MLB and the Players Association are at odds as to how a season would commence amid the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic.

Two basic factors that have been disputed and part of the factional, partisan disagreement as to when the national and state economies should reopen and what level of precautions to take are those of concern to MLB players: health and money. While the money athletes make is obviously mountainous compared to what even well-off everyday people do, who has the right to question their motives when they do what Blake Snell did and openly say he’s worried about his health and, more prominently, his finances?

Here’s Blake Snell discussing MLB’s revenue split proposal this afternoon on Twitch. pic.twitter.com/CCyCai42Aj

— John Flanigan (@jflan816) May 13, 2020

Snell, Trevor Bauer, Sean Doolittle, Bryce Harper, Alex Wood and others have been more outspoken about the risk/reward of playing during the pandemic as negotiations proceed. Even if it is relatively under control – still in question – by the time the season gets underway at the planned date of around July 4, these fears are valid.

For retired players like Mark Teixeira to suggest that players should simply return to the field for less money and placate the fans despite the risks and potential long-term ramifications is disingenuous at best. The odds that he would have said the same thing if he was at a similar point in his career as Snell or Bauer are questionable. Teixeira always treated his career like a businessman and being a businessman requires taking emotions out of the equation to a large degree.

Ex-#Yankees 1B Mark Teixeira on ESPN today: “I would rather make pennies on the dollar and give hope to people and play baseball than not make anything and lose an entire year off their career.” https://t.co/iqg5uI15Br

— Brendan Kuty (@BrendanKutyNJ) May 12, 2020

A prorated salary is a reasonable concession. A well-founded sticking point from the player perspective is if their salaries are suddenly tied to revenue without knowing how that revenue will be calculated as the owners cry losses and poverty. Now the MLBPA is asking for financial documents for proof as part of the negotiations. It’s safe to say that the owners will treat the request like President Trump has with his tax returns, say they will be disclosed at a later date, and simply kick the request as far down the road as they can and hope it will be ignored with the groundswell for some form of play sufficient to get the players to back down on various demands and get on the field.

Given the personal investment in sports and the larger than life personas of athletes, it’s easy to forget that they are human beings with employment, financial, health and family concerns just like anyone else.

Hypothetically, let’s say Mookie Betts, JT Realmuto, Marcus Stroman, George Springer, Marcus Semien, Justin Turner and Bauer shake their heads and say it’s simply not worth it for them to take the field given their pending free agency and the risks involved.

Being called money hungry and selfish is a small price to pay when confronted with the medical concerns related to the illness. It’s important to add in the possibility that these players are sacrificing their opportunity to sell their services to the highest bidder and set themselves and their families up for life financially with the accompanying issues of bringing an illness home, being separated from their families and taking the chance of getting injured for a perfunctory half-season played at neutral sites or in empty home stadiums. Being close in proximity to other people who cannot be watched 24/7 and who are subject to periodic tests that are neither preventative of catching the illness nor will be effective in knowing where every player is and what he’s doing in between tests is one of many aspects to consider.

It turns into a “Why am I doing this?” endeavor.

COVID-19 aside, what if Betts blows out a knee a month before the season ends? What if Stroman tears an elbow ligament and needs Tommy John surgery?

These were considerations that they needed to accept as they played the full season prior to their first shot at free agency. Now, it’s a truncated season for a fraction of their salary with owners seeking to reduce their compensation further with the virtual certainty that they will use the pandemic as a justification to limit the free agent offers players receive in a “never let a crisis go to waste” type of ghostly, ephemeral collusion.

If Betts needs to “settle” for $280 million instead of $380 million, with opt-outs and other sweeteners, he can recoup that if (when) it’s business as usual. The same holds true for younger players in Betts’ age range who are heading for free agency. Turner, 36 in November, will not get another big contract. Would he be wrong to say he’s not risking it?

The pressure will be enormous, but no one can force the players to play in this situation whether there’s an agreement between the owners and MLBPA or not.

What may happen is that owners will try a similar tactic as they did in 1995 and brought replacement players in, except in 2020, the players won’t be scabs in the union sense. Nothing can stop them from compelling young players who are relatively early in their career and are seeking to establish themselves as big leaguers to get on the field with the unsaid threat of “we can just send you to the minors” or imply disfavor in the organization that will not be forgotten at contract time.

The owners are showing such signs of desperation to get the product back on the field – within palatable financial parameters – that it is reasonable to ask if they are truly worried about the health of employees beyond fear of workers’ compensation if the employees get ill or lawsuits if they die. With the fans clamoring for the diversion of baseball, the owners are taking a calculated gamble while trying to implement proposals they have long sought but were roundly rejected during every CBA negotiation. Is it believable that they want to play for the fans? To a degree, yes. Is it likelier that they are thinking about financial considerations in the present and future and taking as much advantage of the pandemic as they can? Of course.

The protocol for play is ever-changing and will predominately hinge on selling the concept – illusory or tangible – of safety. The owners stand to lose financially no matter the outcome. The players will be damaged in their wallets as well, but they are the ones who will take the field and need to risk illness in doing so. Getting beyond the money, the accolades, the fame and the benefits inherent with being a professional athlete, it’s still a job. For them, it’s a job that regardless of its lucrative nature, lasts a relatively short time. Not all of them make hundreds of millions of dollars and it can all be gone in an instant with many not having the ability to do anything else a quarter as well as they play baseball.

Is it worth it for them? And what level of strong arm tactics are the owners willing to use to get a product – not the product, but a product – on the field?

These are questions the MLBPA doesn’t just have the right to ask, but must ask for the protection of its members. This goes beyond money and benefits. It’s about their entire lives. The more pressure the owners exert, the wiser it is for them to protest and ask exactly what they’re getting in exchange for what they’re being asked to give up.

Major League Baseball has announced that the upcoming draft will be five rounds. The details of this decision, the financial reasoning and how it impacts amateurs is discussed here. In analyzing MLB’s likely intent in this drastic step, it’s important to consider the backstory and what led to this. COVID-19, the cancellation of amateur play and delay in professional play sped the changes and reduced the number of rounds far more significantly than was the original intent. However, the combination of culling minor-league teams – discussed here in a  previous post – and the slashing of the number of rounds in the draft is part of a long-term, cost-cutting plan that is largely reliant on the new metrics being more effective at locating players, the teams’ greater cohesiveness in developing them, and the tacit decision to spend even less money on amateurs than MLB was before.

As for the idea that undrafted players might benefit from being undrafted free agents with those having higher ceilings being part of a bidding war to get them more money, forget that too since the bonuses for them have been capped.

These are the unintended consequences of several factors:

• The supposed “better mousetrap” built through the implementation of sabermetrics
• Public demands that minor-leaguers be paid more money
• COVID-19 sapping cash streams and limiting teams’ ability to assess players prior to the draft

The naïveté of those who pressured organizations to pay better wages to minor leaguers is mind blowing. Did they not understand that if clubs agreed to better compensate these players – the overwhelming majority of whom have zero chance of making it to the majors – MLB owners would find other ways to counteract the pay raises? Part of that is cutting the number of minor-league teams: Fewer players, fewer jobs, money saved. Another part of that is slashing the amount they’re paying amateur draftees when they enter pro ball.

Owners wanted the changes; front offices, player development departments and scouts did not.

Guess who won?

Yet front offices are responsible for the ownership expectation of cost-control. That’s why they’re hired. The easiest thing to do in building a championship team when money is not an object is to buy players. Through free agency alone, a title-contending team can be taped together within two or three years, if not fewer. Today though, the easiest way to get the job as a head of baseball operations and get in the owner’s good graces is to say there’s money to be saved and he can still win.

Save money? Done. Sold.

Winning? Yeah. That’ll be good too.

There were owners who wanted to win above all and do it regardless of the cost. Looking up and down MLB and they’re basically all gone. The biggest market teams the Los Angeles Dodgers, New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox are all operating within a budget. Their tactics reflect those budgets. With the deaths of Mike Ilitch and George Steinbrenner, which owner can be described as one whose vault is always open? There isn’t one.

The cutting of the draft is bad enough for players who would have been selected in the “reasonable chance to get a legitimate shot at advancement” rounds of the 10th to the 20th. For players from the fifth round to the ninth, there was a good chance they would be given a better signing bonus and receive an opportunity to play. Now, that’s all gone.

In recent years, MLB has placed great emphasis on streamlining. From ownerships to front offices to the on-field staff, there’s a growing reliance on centralized control dictating how every department functions.

Given the disarray in the past and the different philosophies and pseudo-governments seemingly functioning without oversight from one department and minor-league level to the next, this was a wise step to ensure the organizational standards are universal from top to bottom. Pitching mechanics, defensive positions, roles as a starting pitcher or reliever, hitting styles – all were up for interpretation with one coach saying one thing, another saying another and the player trying to be a good soldier to avoid the death knell reputation of uncoachable malcontent destined to end up as a misaligned, mentally fractured mess. Avoiding that is undoubtedly positive. Still, the belief that it is a solution to every puzzle in finding quality players is a big mistake. Reducing both the draft and the number of minor-league teams lowers the margin for error. That cannot be accounted for by using improved evaluative techniques and advancements.

The irony is that many who are lamenting the reduction in the draft and cutting of minor-league teams are those who heavily pushed like-minded Ivy League educated and SABR-friendly people populating every aspect of an organization. They speak out of both sides of their mouths when expressing dismay and disgust at these decisions while mocking and ridiculing those who clung to an old-school sensibility.

The system of casting a wide net in selecting amateurs made a degree of sense in the 1950s and 1960s when there were 15 to 20 minor-league affiliates to an organization. Now, it does not.

If teams are using different methods to scout players and gauge their future, it makes sense to expect there to be less variability in what constitutes a legitimate prospect. As the above-linked post regarding the needlessness of so many minor-league affiliates says, a precious few players who are drafted beyond the 10th round make it to the majors and contribute to a large degree. Some do, but it’s rare. Owners are justified in saying that these supposedly brilliant front offices who discovered new methods to value major leaguers and pay them accordingly should be able to do the same thing with finding amateurs to develop.

The argument could be made that this started with Moneyball. What Billy Beane was doing was the equivalent of a local farm looking at its finances, realizing it couldn’t compete with factory farms and relied on supplying farm-to-table restaurants and challenging bigger, better-financed corporate competitors with a different blueprint than the one the well-heeled entities were using. Once it was successful, became popular and Beane’s Oakland Athletics were spending a fraction of what the big market teams were, it was a natural progression for those big market teams to say, “Why can’t we do that?” and put their financial might to work replicating what the smaller entity did on a grand scale.

And they did.

St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt hired Jeff Luhnow knowing Luhnow had worked at McKinsey & Company, the global management consultant. McKinsey’s modus operandi is to ruthlessly cut the fat and help productivity. If that means stepping on toes by eliminating jobs, so be it. If that means alienating entrenched longtime employees, it needs to be done for the greater good from their perspective. DeWitt knew who he was hiring and why. That general manager Walt Jocketty and manager Tony La Russa looked at Luhnow as an unwanted interloper usurping their power and invading their domain without having paid the dues they did was irrelevant.

DeWitt wanted to do it the way Beane was doing it. Part of Luhnow’s strategy was to not waste lower-round picks on legacies and players who were just random names who a scout might have liked for some unquantifiable reason. His latter-round hits included Tommy Pham, Matt Carpenter, Matt Adams and Trevor Rosenthal. Despite good success in the back end of the draft, the front end was mediocre having taken Brett Wallace, Pete Kozma, Zach Cox and other busts in the first round.

Five rounds sounds extreme because it is extreme. But this is all part of a long-range plan on the part of MLB to reduce the number of rounds to a level it feels comfortable with based on the reduced need for players and the secondary cost-cutting from fewer being drafted. Going forward, it won’t be five rounds, but it will be 15 to 20 rounds. A significant portion of those who protested the drastic reduction will be placated with the tactical sleight of hand of living through five and then getting 15 to 20.

All owners, to a certain degree, want to win. Some are more financially committed to it than others, but they would like to win a championship and have a new bragging right within the super-wealthy circles they run with. If an owner sees a way to win while saving money, he’s going to jump at it. If there’s money to be made, it will sometimes stem from money to be saved. Telling an owner he can win while spending X money vs spending X money squared, the former will be chosen every single time. And they’re not wrong to do that. People wanted the minor-leaguers to be paid more and this is a direct result of that. They’ll get more money if they’re drafted, but now a big chunk of those who would have been drafted with a longer draft won’t be. It evens out…for the owners. As usual.